My daughter started suffering many years ago when things became tougher at school.

Here is my story shortened down to make it easier to explain.

She has always been a hard worker with great organisation skills and lots of common sense.

Because she has always been very quiet at school and well behaved she became invisible to the teachers.

Homework was coming home from school nearly every night!

My daughter would not rest until she had done it all, this took ages as she needed lots of help to understand it.

My husband and I spent lots of time at home trying to help her improve her skills so she would find it easier at school.

She had weekly spelling tests swapping tests to mark with the other children in the class marking each other work and if they scored under 7 (which was out of 10) ,they would have to stay in at break time to practise.

She got extremely stressed out by these tests and didn't want to be embarrassed by a low score so started memorising the words rather than understanding them.(I found this out at a later stage when i realised she wasn't really understanding but memorising and 2 weeks later when I asked her to spell those words she couldn't) this went on for years before we realised.

Whatever stress she was under at school made her ill and she started sleepwalking , not eating very well and losing her hair. We had various tests done at the doctors and luckily everything was fine.

Many phone calls and meetings with the school got us no further and my daughter's health got worse.

We decided to homeschool her and for a year and a half her health improved and so did her Maths and English skills.

Thanks to Zoella (if any not familiar with her she is a famous vlogger and YouTuber ) my daughter started to relate to Zoella's honesty about her anxiety issues and she then came to me about her feelings and her anxiety.

We got professional help for my daughter with her anxiety and my daughter very slowly became stronger and more able to cope. She decided that she wanted to go back to school ,so of course, we supported her with this.

We found a school that we were all happy with and she started back after Easter last year 2015. This time, we have had so much support from the school and i cannot fault it. However, her anxiety got the better of her , worrying about tests, speaking out in class, scary teenagers, walking to school and back by herself...... the list goes on.

Sleepwalking, hair loss , loss of appetite all came back but even worse, she became physically sick vomiting with worry and constantly on the toilet with diarrhoea, lost loads of weight, became depressed rarely saw any friends and became too unwell to dance. Of course we had been to and from the doctors a million times and finally got to see a specialist who took one look at her and took her straight to the hospital where she stayed most of that week.

His words will haunt me forever saying that she was very close to death and a few more weeks being left like this could have killed her. After lots and lots of tests in the hospital my daughter was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease which was a massive shock but at least we could now treat it and help her get better.

We didn't really know much about Crohn's Disease at the time and are still learning now, but basically it is a long-term condition that causes inflammation of the lining of the digestive system. It is linked to anxiety and stress and unfortunately stomach flare ups which trigger the Crohn's disease to be at its worse are triggered by this. She nearly died because it had taken so long to find out what was wrong waiting for the specialist ,that with her sickness and diarrhoea and rapid weight loss she had become undernourished.

My daughter was a trooper though and because she didn't want to be put on a drip she drank her medicines (which are extremely unpleasant!) 6 times a day for 6 weeks with no food at all and just water to drink. This improved her health and is now getting stronger and slowly gaining some weight, although she is still very small. She gets to school when she can and they have been so supportive and helpful through the tough times!

I wanted to share my story and would love to hear from anybody who has Crohn's disease or has any children who have it.